Part 1

Chapter 3

ÉTIENNE had at last descended from the
platform and entered the Voreux; he spoke to men
whom he met, asking if there was work to be had,
but all shook their heads, telling him to wait for
the captain. They left him free to roam through
the ill-lighted buildings, full of black holes,
confusing with their complicated stories and
rooms. After having mounted a dark and
half-destroyed staircase, he found himself on a
shaky footbridge; then he crossed the screening
shed, which was plunged in such profound darkness
that he walked with his hands before him for
protection. Suddenly two enormous yellow eyes
pierced the darkness in front of him. He was
beneath the pit-frame in the receiving room, at
the very mouth of the shaft.

A captain, Father Richomme, a big man with the
face of a good-natured gendarme, and with a
straight grey moustache, was at that moment going
towards the receiver's office.

"Do they want a hand here for any kind of
work?" asked Étienne again.

Richomme was about to say no, but he changed his
mind and replied like the others, as he went away:

"Wait for Monsieur Dansaert, the head
captain."

Four lanterns were placed there, and the
reflectors which threw all the light on to the
shaft vividly illuminated the iron rail, the
levers of the signals and bars, the joists of the
guides along which slid the two cages. The rest
of the vast room, like the nave of a church, was
obscure, and peopled by great floating shadows.
Only the lamp-cabin shone at the far end, while in
the receiver's office a small lamp looked like a
fading star. Work was about to be resumed, and on
the iron pavement there was a continual thunder,
trains of coal being wheeled without ceasing,
while the landers, with their long, bent backs,
could be distinguished amid the movement of all
these black and noisy things, in perpetual
agitation.

For a moment Étienne stood motionless,
deafened and blinded. He felt frozen by the
currents of air which entered from every side.
Then he moved on a few paces, attracted by the
winding engine, of which he could now see the
glistening steel and copper. It was twenty-five
metres beyond the shaft, in a loftier chamber, and
placed so solidly on its brick foundation that
though it worked at full speed, with all its four
hundred horsepower, the movement of its enormous
crank, emerging and plunging with oily softness,
imparted no quiver to the walls. The engine-man,
standing at his post, listened to the ringing of
the signals, and his eye never moved from the
indicator where the shaft was figured, with its
different levels, by a vertical groove traversed
by shot hanging to strings, which represented the
cages; and at each departure, when the machine was
put in motion, the drums--two immense wheels, five
metres in radius, by means of which the two steel
cables were rolled and unrolled-- turned with such
rapidity that they became like grey powder.

"Look out, there!" cried three landers,
who were dragging an immense ladder.

Étienne just escaped being crushed; his
eyes were soon more at home, and he watched the
cables moving in the air, more than thirty metres
of steel ribbon, which flew up into the pit-frame
where they passed over pulleys to descend
perpendicularly into the shaft, where they were
attached to the cages. An iron frame, like the
high scaffolding of a belfry, supported the
pulleys. It was like the gliding of a bird,
noiseless, without a jar, this rapid flight, the
continual come and go of a thread of enormous
weight, capable of lifting twelve thousand
kilograms at the rate of ten metres a second.

"Attention there, for God's sake!" cried
again the landers, pushing the ladder to the other
side in order to climb to the left-hand pulley.
Slowly Étienne returned to the receiving
room. This giant flight over his head took away
his breath. Shivering in the currents of air, he
watched the movement of the cages, his ears
deafened by the rumblings of the trams. Near the
shaft the signal was working, a heavy-levered
hammer drawn by a cord from below and allowed to
strike against a block. One blow to stop, two to
go down, three to go up; it was unceasing, like
blows of a club dominating the tumult, accompanied
by the clear sound of the bell; while the lander,
directing the work, increased the noise still more
by shouting orders to the engine-man through a
trumpet. The cages in the middle of the clear
space appeared and disappeared, were filled and
emptied, without Étienne being at all able
to understand the complicated proceeding.

He only understood one thing well: the shaft
swallowed men by mouthfuls of twenty or thirty,
and with so easy a gulp that it seemed to feel
nothing go down. Since four o'clock the descent
of the workmen had been going on. They came to
the shed with naked feet and their lamps in their
hands, waiting in little groups until a sufficient
number had arrived. Without a sound, with the
soft bound of a nocturnal beast, the iron cage
arose from the night, wedged itself on the bolts
with its four decks, each containing two trains
full of coal. Landers on different platforms took
out the trains and replaced them by others, either
empty or already laden with trimmed wooden props;
and it was into the empty trains that the workmen
crowded, five at a time, up to forty. When they
filled all the compartments, an order came from
the trumpet--a hollow indistinct roar--while the
signal cord was pulled four times from below,
"ringing meat," to give warning of this
burden of human flesh. Then, after a slight leap,
the cage plunged silently, falling like a stone,
only leaving behind it the vibrating flight of a
cable.

"Is it deep?" asked Étienne of a
miner, who waited near him with a sleepy air.

"Five hundred and fifty-four metres,"
replied the man. "But there are four levels,
the first at three hundred and twenty." Both
were silent, with their eyes on the returning
cable. Étienne said again:

"And if it breaks?"

"Ah! if it breaks--"

The miner ended with a gesture. His turn had
arrived; the cage had reappeared with its easy,
unfatigued movement. He squatted in it with some
comrades; it plunged down, then flew up again in
less then four minutes to swallow down another
load of men. For half an hour the shaft went on
devouring in this fashion, with more or less
greedy gulps, according to the depth of the level
to which the men went down, but without stopping,
always hungry, with its giant intestines capable
of digesting a nation. It went on filling and
still filling, and the darkness remained dead.
The cage mounted from the void with the same
voracious silence.

Étienne was at last seized again by the
same depression which he had experienced on the
pit bank. What was the good of persisting? This
head captain would send him off like the others.
A vague fear suddenly decided him: he went away,
only stopping before the building of the engine
room. The wide-open door showed seven boilers
with two furnaces. In the midst of the white
steam and the whistling of the escapes a stoker
was occupied in piling up one of the furnaces, the
heat of which could be felt as far as the
threshold; and the young man was approaching glad
of the warmth, when he met a new band of colliers
who had just arrived at the pit. It was the Maheu
and Levaque set. When he saw Catherine at the
head, with her gentle boyish air, a superstitious
idea caused him to risk another question.

"I say there, mate! do they want a hand here
for any kind of work?"

She looked at him surprised, rather frightened at
this sudden voice coming out of the shadow. But
Maheu, behind her, had heard and replied, talking
with Étienne for a moment. No, no one was
wanted. This poor devil of a man who had lost his
way here interested him. When he left him he said
to the others:

"Eh! one might easily be like that. Mustn't
complain: every one hasn't the chance to work
himself to death."

The band entered and went straight to the shed, a
vast hall roughly boarded and surrounded by
cupboards shut by padlocks. In the centre an iron
fireplace, a sort of closed stove without a door,
glowed red and was so stuffed with burning coal
that fragments flew out and rolled on to the
trodden soil. The hall was only lighted by this
stove, from which sanguine reflections danced
along the greasy woodwork up to the ceiling,
stained with black dust. As the Maheus went into
the heat there was a sound of laughter. Some
thirty workmen were standing upright with their
backs to the fire, roasting themselves with an air
of enjoyment. Before going down, they all came
here to get a little warmth in their skins, so
that they could face the dampness of the pit. But
this morning there was much amusement: they were
joking Mouquette, a putter girl of eighteen, whose
enormous breasts and flanks were bursting through
her old jacket and breeches. She lived at
Réquillart with her father old Mouque, a
groom, and Mouquet, her brother, a lander; but
their hours of work were not the same; she went to
the pit by herself, and in the middle of the
wheat-fields in summer, or against a wall in
winter, she took her pleasure with her lover of
the week. All in the mine had their turn; it was
a perpetual round of comrades without further
consequences. One day, when reproached about a
Marchiennes nail-maker, she was furiously angry,
exclaiming that she respected herself far too
much, that she would cut her arm off if any one
could boast that he had seen her with any one but
a collier.

"It isn't that big Chaval now?" said a
miner grinning; "did that little fellow have
you? He must have needed a ladder. I saw you
behind Réquillart; more by token he'd
perched himself on a boundary-stone."

"Well," replied Mouquette,
good-humouredly, "what's that to do with you?
You were not asked to push."

And this gross good-natured joke increased the
laughter of the men, who expanded their shoulders,
half cooked by the stove, while she herself,
shaken by laughter, was displaying in the midst of
them the indecency of her costume, embarrasingly
comical, with her masses of flesh exaggerated
almost to disease.

But the gaiety ceased; Mouquette told Maheu that
Fleurance, big Fleurance, would never come again;
she had been found the night before stiff in her
bed; some said it was her heart, others that it
was a pint of gin she had drunk too quickly. And
Maheu was in despair; another piece of ill-luck;
one of the best of his putters gone without any
chance of replacing her at once. He was working
in a set; there were four pikemen associated in
his cutting, himself, Zacharie, Levaque, and
Chaval. If they had Catherine alone to wheel, the
work would suffer.

Suddenly he called out:

"I have it! there was that man looking for
work!" At that moment Dansaert passed before
the shed. Maheu told him the story, and asked for
his authority to engage the man; he emphasized the
desire of the Company to substitute men for women,
as at Anzin. The head captain smiled at first;
for the scheme of excluding women from the pit was
not usually well received by the miners, who were
troubled about placing their daughters, and not
much affected by questions of morality and health.
But after some hesitation he gave his permission,
reserving its ratification for Monsieur
Négrel, the engineer.

"All very well!" exclaimed Zacharie;
"the man must be away by this time."

"No," said Catherine. "I saw him
stop at the boilers."

"After him, then, lazy," cried Maheu.

The young girl ran forward; while a crowd of
miners proceeded to the shaft, yielding the fire
to others.

Jeanlin, without waiting for his father, went also
to take his lamp, together with Bébert, a
big, stupid boy, and Lydie, a small child of ten.
Mouquette, who was in front of them, called out in
the black passage they were dirty brats, and
threatened to box their ears if they pinched her.

Étienne was, in fact, in the boiler
building, talking with a stoker, who was charging
the furnaces with coal. He felt very cold at the
thought of the night into which he must return.
But he was deciding to set out, when he felt a
hand placed on his shoulder.

"Come," said Catherine; "there's
something for you." At first he could not
understand. Then he felt a spasm of joy, and
vigorously squeezed the young girl's hands.

"Thanks, mate. Ah! you're a good chap, you
are!"

She began to laugh, looking at him in the red
light of the furnaces, which lit them up. It
amused her that he should take her for a boy,
still slender, with her knot of hair hidden
beneath the cap. He also was laughing, with
satisfaction, and they remained, for a moment,
both laughing in each other's faces with radiant
cheeks.

Maheu, squatting down before his box in the shed,
was taking off his sabots and his coarse woollen
stockings. When Étienne arrived everything
was settled in three or four words: thirty sous a
day, hard work, but work that he would easily
learn. The pikeman advised him to keep his shoes,
and lent him an old cap, a leather hat for the
protection of his skull, a precaution which the
father and his children disdained. The tools were
taken out of the chest, where also was found
Fleurance's shovel. Then, when Maheu had shut up
their sabots, their stockings, as well as
Étienne's bundle, he suddenly became
impatient.

"What is that lazy Chaval up to? Another
girl given a tumble on a pile of stones? We are
half an hour late to-day."

Zacharie and Levaque were quietly roasting their
shoulders. The former said at last:

"Is it Chaval you're waiting for? He came
before us, and went down at once."

"What! you knew that, and said nothing?
Come, come, look sharp!"

Catherine, who was warming her hands, had to
follow the band. Étienne allowed her to
pass, and went behind her. Again he journeyed
through a maze of staircases and obscure corridors
in which their naked feet produced the soft sound
of old slippers. But the lamp-cabin was
glittering--a glass house, full of hooks in rows,
holding hundreds of Davy lamps, examined and
washed the night before, and lighted like candles
in chapel. At the barrier each workman took his
own, stamped with his number; then he examined it
and shut it himself, while the marker, seated at a
table, inscribed on the registers the hour of
descent. Maheu had to intervene to obtain a lamp
for his new putter, and there was still another
precaution: the workers defiled before an
examiner, who assured himself that all the lamps
were properly closed.

"Golly! It's not warm here," murmured
Catherine, shivering.

Étienne contented himself with nodding his
head. He was in front of the shaft, in the midst
of a vast hall swept by currents of air. He
certainly considered himself brave, but he felt a
disagreeable emotion at his chest amid this
thunder of trains, the hollow blows of the
signals, the stifled howling of the trumpet, the
continual flight of those cables, unrolled and
rolled at full speed by the drums of the engine.
The cages rose and sank with the gliding movement
of a nocturnal beast, always engulfing men, whom
the throat of the hole seemed to drink. It was
his turn now. He felt very cold, and preserved a
nervous silence which made Zacharie and Levaque
grin; for both of them disapproved of the hiring
of this unknown man, especially Levaque, who was
offended that he had not been consulted. So
Catherine was glad to hear her father explain
things to the young man.

"Look! above the cage there is a parachute
with iron grapnels to catch into the guides in
case of breakage. Does it work? Oh, not always.
Yes, the shaft is divided into three compartments,
closed by planking from top to bottom; in the
middle the cages, on the left the passage for the
ladders----"

But he interrupted himself to grumble, though
taking care not to raise his voice much.

"What are we stuck here for, blast it? What
right have they to freeze us in this way?"

The captain, Richomme, who was going down himself,
with his naked lamp fixed by a nail into the
leather of his cap, heard him.

"Careful! Look out for ears," he
murmured paternally, as an old miner with a
affectionate feeling for comrades. "Workmen
must do what they can. Hold on! here we are; get
in with your fellows."

The cage, provided with iron bands and a
small-meshed lattice work, was in fact awaiting
them on the bars. Maheu, Zacharie, and Catherine
slid into a tram below, and as all five had to
enter, Étienne in his turn went in, but the
good places were taken; he had to squeeze himself
near the young girl, whose elbow pressed into his
belly. His lamp embarrassed him; they advised him
to fasten it to the button-hole of his jacket.
Not hearing, he awkwardly kept it in his hand.
The embarkation continued, above and below, a
confused packing of cattle. They did not,
however, set out. What, then, was happening? It
seemed to him that his impatience lasted for many
minutes. At last he felt a shock, and the light
grew dim, everything around him seemed to fly,
while he experienced the dizzy anxiety of a fall
contracting his bowels. This lasted as long as he
could see light, through the two reception
stories, in the midst of the whirling by of the
scaffolding. Then, having fallen into the
blackness of the pit, he became stunned, no longer
having any clear perception of his sensations.

"Now we are off," said Maheu quietly.

They were all at their ease. He asked himself at
times if he was going up or down. Now and then,
when the cage went straight without touching the
guides, there seemed to be no motion, but rough
shocks were afterwards produced, a sort of dancing
amid the joists, which made him fear a
catastrophe. For the rest he could not
distinguish the walls of the shaft behind the
lattice work, to which he pressed his face. The
lamps feebly lighted the mass of bodies at his
feet. Only the captain's naked light, in the
neighbouring tram, shone like a lighthouse.

"This is four metres in diameter,"
continued Maheu, to instruct him. "The
tubbing wants doing over again, for the water
comes in everywhere. Stop! we are reaching the
bottom: do you hear?"

Étienne was, in fact, now asking himself
the meaning of this noise of falling rain. A few
large drops had at first sounded on the roof of
the cage, like the beginning of a shower, and now
the rain increased, streaming down, becoming at
last a deluge. The roof must be full of holes,
for a thread of water was flowing on to his
shoulder and wetting him to the skin. The cold
became icy. and they were buried in black
humidity, when they passed through a sudden flash
of light, the vision of a cavern in which men were
moving. But already they had fallen back into
darkness.

Maheu said:

"That is the first main level. We are at
three hundred and twenty metres. See the
speed."

Raising his lamp he lighted up a joist of the
guides which fled by like a rail beneath a train
going at full speed; and beyond, as before,
nothing could be seen. They passed three other
levels in flashes of light. The deafening rain
continued to strike through the darkness.

"How deep it is!" murmured
Étienne.

This fall seemed to last for hours. He was
suffering for the cramped position he had taken,
not daring to move, and especially tortured by
Catherine's elbow. She did not speak a word; he
only felt her against him and it warmed him. When
the cage at last stopped at the bottom, at five
hundred and fifty-four metres, he was astonished
to learn that the descent had lasted exactly one
minute. But the noise of the bolts fixing
themselves, the sensation of solidity beneath,
suddenly cheered him; and he was joking when he
said to Catherine:

"What have you got under your skin to be so
warm? I've got your elbow in my belly, sure
enough."

Then she also burst out laughing. Stupid of him,
still to take her for a boy! Were his eyes out?

"It's in your eye that you've got my
elbow!" she replied, in the midst of a storm
of laughter which the astonished young man could
not account for.

The cage voided its burden of workers, who crossed
the pit-eye hall, a chamber cut in the rock,
vaulted with masonry, and lighted up by three
large lamps. Over the iron flooring the porters
were violently rolling laden trams. A cavernous
odour exhaled from the walls, a freshness of
saltpetre in which mingled hot breaths from the
neighbouring stable. The openings of four
galleries yawned here.

"This way," said Maheu to
Étienne. "You're not there yet. It
is still two kilometres."

The workmen separated, and were lost in groups in
the depths of these black holes.. Some fifteen
went off into that on the left, and Étienne
walked last, behind Maheu, who was preceded by
Catherine, Zacharie, and Levaque. It was a large
gallery for wagons, through a bed of solid rock,
which had only needed walling here and there. In
single file they still went on without a word, by
the tiny flame of the lamps. The young man
stumbled at every step, and entangled his feet in
the rails. For a moment a hollow sound disturbed
him, the sound of a distant storm, the violence of
which seemed to increase and to come from the
bowels of the earth. Was it the thunder of a
landslip bringing on to their heads the enormous
mass which separated them from the light? A gleam
pierced the night, he felt the rock tremble, and
when he had placed himself close to the wall, like
his comrades, he saw a large white horse close to
his face, harnessed to a train of wagons. On the
first, and holding the reins, was seated
Bébert, while Jeanlin, with his hands
leaning on the edge of the last, was running
barefooted behind.

They again began their walk. Farther on they
reached crossways, where two new galleries opened,
and the band divided again, the workers gradually
entering all the stalls of the mine.

Now the wagon-gallery was constructed of wood;
props of timber supported the roof, and made for
the crumbly rock a screen of scaffolding, behind
which one could see the plates of schist
glimmering with mica, and the coarse masses of
dull, rough sandstone. Trains of tubs, full or
empty, continually passed, crossing each other
with their thunder, borne into the shadow by vague
beasts trotting by like phantoms. On the double
way of a shunting line a long, black serpent
slept, a train at standstill, with a snorting
horse, whose crupper looked like a block fallen
from the roof. Doors for ventilation were slowly
opening and shutting. And as they advanced the
gallery became more narrow and lower, and the roof
irregular, forcing them to bend their backs
constantly.

Étienne struck his head hard; without his
leather cap he would have broken his skull.
However, he attentively followed the slightest
gestures of Maheu, whose sombre profile was seen
against the glimmer of the lamps. None of the
workmen knocked themselves; they evidently knew
each boss, each knot of wood or swelling in the
rock. The young man also suffered from the
slippery soil, which became damper and damper. At
times he went through actual puddles, only
revealed by the muddy splash of his feet. But
what especially astonished him were the sudden
changes of temperature. At the bottom of the
shaft it was very chilly, and in the
wagon-gallery, through which all the air of the
mine passed, an icy breeze was blowing, with the
violence of a tempest, between the narrow walls.
Afterwards, as they penetrated more deeply along
other passages which only received a meagre share
of air, the wind fell and the heat increased, a
suffocating heat as heavy as lead.

Maheu had not again opened his mouth. He turned
down another gallery to the right, simply saying
to Étienne, without looking round:

"The Guillaume seam."

It was the seam which contained their cutting. At
the first step, Étienne hurt his head and
elbows. The sloping roof descended so low that,
for twenty or thirty metres at a time, he had to
walk bent double. The water came up to his
ankles. After two hundred metres of this, he saw
Levaque, Zacharie, and Catherine disappear, as
though they had flown through a narrow fissure
which was open in front of him.

"We must climb," said Maheu.
"Fasten your lamp to a button-hole and hang
on to the wood." He himself disappeared, and
Étienne had to follow him. This
chimney-passage left in the seam was reserved for
miners, and led to all the secondary passages. It
was about the thickness of the coal-bed, hardly
sixty centimetres. Fortunately the young man was
thin, for, as he was still awkward, he hoisted
himself up with a useless expense of muscle,
flattening his shoulders and hips, advancing by
the strength of his wrists, clinging to the
planks. Fifteen metres higher they came on the
first secondary passage, but they had to continue,
as the cutting of Maheu and his mates was in the
sixth passage, in hell, as they said; every
fifteen metres the passages were placed over each
other in never-ending succession through this
cleft, which scraped back and chest.
Étienne groaned as if the weight of the
rocks had pounded his limbs; with torn hands and
bruised legs, he also suffered from lack of air,
so that he seemed to feel the blood bursting
through his skin. He vaguely saw in one passage
two squatting beasts, a big one and a little one,
pushing trains: they were Lydie and Mouquette
already at work. And he had still to climb the
height of two cuttings! He was blinded by sweat,
and he despaired of catching up the others, whose
agile limbs he heard brushing against the rock
with a long gliding movement.

"Cheer up! here we are!" said
Catherine's voice.

He had, in fact, arrived, and another voice cried
from the bottom of the cutting:

"Well, is this the way to treat people? I
have two kilometres to walk from Montsou and I am
here first." It was Chaval, a tall, lean,
bony fellow of twenty-five, with strongly marked
features, who was in a bad humour at having to
wait. When he saw Étienne he asked, with
contemptuous surprise:

"What's that?"

And when Maheu had told him the story he added
between his teeth:

"These men are eating the bread of
girls."

The two men exchanged, a look, lighted up by one
of those instinctive hatreds which suddenly flame
up. Étienne had felt the insult without
yet understanding it. There was silence, and they
got to work. At last all the seams were gradually
filled, and the cuttings were in movement at every
level and at the end of every passage. The
devouring shaft had swallowed its daily ration of
men: nearly seven hundred hands, who were now at
work in this giant ant-hill, everywhere making
holes in the earth, drilling it like an old
worm-eaten piece of wood. And in the middle of
the heavy silence and crushing weight of the
strata one could hear, by placing one's ear to the
rock, the movement of these human insects at work,
from the flight of the cable which moved the cage
up and down, to the biting of the tools cutting
out the coal at the end of the stalls.
Étienne, on turning round, found himself
again pressed close to Catherine. But this time
he caught a glimpse of the developing curves of
her breast: he suddenly understood the warmth
which had penetrated him.